Perhaps to a nihilist maybe that's not a bad thing, but to most that's neither good nor nihilism. This is a serious problem.

Last I knew, kids were still largely growing up in schools where being smart is dumb and prosecuted through bullying. That’s sufficient for mass depression to climb when the rest of life becomes more stressful. I.e. people really are having a hard time finding actually good work that provides health care and a steady paycheck and decent work environment. The opioid crisis has fallouts, in addition.

Most of what I just said was said by the hippies in the 60s.

Americans seem to bring guns to church to shoot church goers. They bring guns to cinemas to shoot patrons. They leave guns in their car's back seat so their infant can accidentally shoot them through the back of their own head.

I think the example of gun violence has a solution found outside the topic of teen depression.

Gun ownership and the romanticism around the 'right to bear arms' in the US is a whole deluded issue in itself.

You mean basically every society ever?

Children like to think they're special. Parents of children like to think their child is special. And we're doing more than ever to try to convince children that they're special. But reality is not so kind. The vast majority of people, by definition, are not special and never will be. The internet emphasizes this truism. Whether your personal desire is intelligence, strength, beauty, music, or some other skill - the internet will emphasize that, even for your age, you suck.

That explains the useless part at least. As for joyless, I think the huge number of apps designed to give you that constant burst of something, ostensibly dopamine, that gives that feeling of joy (and more importantly from their perspective, addiction) is something that I think will have, almost with complete certainty, unforeseen consequences. Look at casinos and you see people that who are 'happily' inserting their pennies and pulling the rod - yet they look, and mostly are, completely miserable. Their addiction we consider negative because money is directly involved, yet is the addition to notifications, numbers, and all the sort of bells and whistles modern social sites use to trigger addiction truly that different? If anything, the insidious nature of it all makes it seem even worse.

--Edit--

Interesting, people didn't seem to realize this was true. Here [1] is a study from Gallup on peoples' views on wealth. There is a strong inverse correlation between the number of people that expect to become "rich" and age. For ages 18-29 it's 51%. That decreases down to 8% by the time people are 65, which is still unrealistic.

That study is from 2003, yet its results have been replicated with minimal change in other more recent studies as well (though not from Gallup). It's part of the reason that education loans are simultaneously so overtly predatory, but also phenomenally successful (from the point of view of lenders). Young people are completely unrealistic about their chances for success and so the implications of taking on mountains of debt with often poor interest rates, when you're young, is something they cannot accurately assess.

[1] - http://news.gallup.com/poll/7981/Half-Young-People-Expect-St...

Kahneman would disagree. Correlation is only weak for those above the median income. Furthermore, a lower than median income appears to amplify other negative factors (illness, stress, etc.)

Note that the study data is 10 years old. It would be interesting to know what today’s kids today believe is the median.

I don't want to just write you off with a snotty, "Rubbish!", but IMHO, yes, this is rubbish. Nihilism is just plain wrong-headed. It's answering, "No" where you should answer, "Mu"[1].

[1] -- http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/M/mu.html

"What is the meaning of life?" - a nihilist would answer 'mu'.

"Is there any intrinsic meaning to life?" - a nihilist would answer 'no', and it seems to me that 'mu' would be an obvious copout.

Is your point that the word 'meaning' itself is meaningless?

Yes, it does seem to me that "mu" would be a copout. A binary question about a well-specified (you could say, meaningful, ahaha) concept should not be answered with "mu".

>Is your point that the word 'meaning' itself is meaningless?

No, more that the kind of people who ask "is there a meaning to life?" are underspecifying the word. I think it would be useful to have a companion here to "mu", meaning, "Your question is so vague as to be meaningless."

An easy way to see the issue is to ask: what would it be like (whether that's what we really experience or not) for there to definitively be meaning in life? If you can't answer that, can't ground such a basically humanistic question in even potential human experience, then I charge that the question has become meaningless, and should thus be either refined or discarded.

You aren't taking nihilism seriously enough.

You aren't taking nihilism seriously enough.

it drove nietzsche insane, and he was much smarter and greater than any of us

nihilism is terrible and heroic and demonic, and possibly true

but i don't think so

Becoming unwilling to manifest any faith in anything at all is absolutely a bad thing.

I mean someone who is a nihilist might think that but it’s not a logical consequence of, or foundational feature of, nihilism.

You can’t work to think nothing is of any consequence and simultaneously work to build anything of value (family, friendships, business, intellect, etc). Nihilism is the abolishment of value systems. Nothing matters. Building things of value requires a system to evaluate value.

That is existential nihilism.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Existential_nihilism

> According to the theory, each individual is an isolated being born into the universe, barred from knowing "why", yet compelled to invent meaning.

> The common thread in the literature of the existentialists is coping with the emotional anguish arising from our confrontation with nothingness, and they expended great energy responding to the question of whether surviving it was possible. Their answer was a qualified "Yes," advocating a formula of passionate commitment and impassive stoicism.

Here is a nice model of human cognitive development beyond the meaninglessness of nihilism:

http://newpossibilitiesassociates.com/uploads/9_levels_of_in...

Also see David Chapman’s writings on Robert Keegan’s models - https://vividness.live/2015/10/12/developing-ethical-social-...

It's kinda hard to imagine a society where all meaningful interaction takes place online that's not massively depressing.

My own personal observation is people who are totally absorbed in social media are socially anxious and awkward, don't engage in conversation except about things that are in their very narrow areas of interest, and tend to suddenly get heated or "triggered" very quickly when exploring those subjects.

There really is no such thing as "casual conversation" with them. You're either engaging in total mind-meld or you're completely ignored. I don't understand that mindset, so I'm keeping an open mind, but I don't see how that can't trap a person into a rigid and boring life, where you're confined to your home most of the time and only engage with people who share 99% of your opinions about things that only affect you in a marginal way.

Thankfully at least my imagination can step out of this reality. I can see a scenario where people are spread thin and just use remote conversation instead of in-person.

I can see a world where politics and profiteering don't end up in the way of quality communications tools.

Information about wars being waged, global poverty, the US raging wars, nuclear holocaust fears, and the feedback loops that the effect of anybody becoming a journalist these days creates. Also the combination of internet trolls, systematic brainwashing and censorship, makes it even harder to understand what is real and what is not.

But it might be the phones, I see more and more kids, like aged 10 - 15, walking in the playgrounds, streets, sitting down with phones in their hands, staring at some game or video that is providing them with constant small feedback. It used to be that if you were outside, you at least were walking and concentrating on just that, or you were sitting down with your friends at the playground, now everybody seems to have a phone or they are looking at somebody elses phone.

It's a complex issue for sure. But I wouldn't blame the kids either, as they learn these habits from their parents, who to be honest most are just getting used to the internet phenomena and global information access, it's not that much of an old thing, although us working in the technical field who have had access since maybe childhood to BBSs etc might think so.

Books are categorically different from smartphones. For one, they don't constantly interrupt regular conversations by beeping and buzzing and demanding the owner's attention. For another, they tend to be about a single subject, and tend to explore that subject in depth.

If you have 500 friends, your feed is dominated by the 5 friends with spectacular stories about their stupendous lives.

Continuously comparing your ordinary life against your feed naturally makes you feel bad about yourself.

And being on public display 24x7, with the pressure to perform for your audience, in a never-ending struggle to keep up, must do incredible damage to the psyche.

That being said, it might be wise to control access to this type of information until your children grow up and get better context / moral code to deal with such things.

Lotta leaps in such a short span of text.

This is in no way a proven fact. Only one of many possible philosophical views on life.

> Maybe they see a wold that's yelling at them, calling them entitled, where they know they'll be in more debt and less paid than any other generation before them. Maybe it's just the pure knowledge of our place as cogs in the gears.

Yes and they have a 24/7 view of the world now. You didn't have that even 20 years ago.

> Are they just looking at the US? If you didn't find similar numbers in Europe, where they have the same access to cellphones and technology, they you have to address the other issues such as health care, better pubic welfare, freedom of transportation and high standards of living.

Those factors already exist in the US-some have higher standards of living here than others, some have better healthcare, some have freedom of exploration and the numbers are still there.